Posts by Matthew Dickinson

I rarely focus an entire post on a single piece of punditry, but Ron Fournier’s National Journal article today, under the title “The Summer of Obama’s Disconnect” exemplifies so many of the misunderstandings regarding presidential power that I thought it deserved my (and your) undivided attention. Fournier’s basic point – one that has become the […]

Typically my Saturday post centers on a trip back using the WayBack machine to revisit some presidential archive, but I confess I’m too distraught over the President’s monumental gaffe to even bother with my usual topic. You know the gaffe I mean – Obama admitted during his press confidence two days ago that he didn’t […]

In my years of punditry sophisticated application of political science to presidential politics, it has been rare for a president to both confirm my take on his previous actions and to follow my advice on what to do next within hours of my post on the topic. (Please, hold the hate mail – I’m not […]

With news reports suggesting the Obama administration is contemplating extending air strikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) into Syria, it is worth revisiting Hillary Clinton’s implicit criticism that Obama’s foreign policy lacks any underlying guiding principles. You will recall that in her interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Clinton opined that […]

I vowed that this year I would not engage in the annual “The President is on Vacation Now?!” madness. In past years when I’ve engaged in this debate, I felt a little like Clark Griswold persuading his family to go to Walleye World (more on that below). As I’ve noted in previous columns, the “discussion” […]

I’m up today at U.S. News with an analysis of Republican Senator Jim Jeffords’ decision in 2001 to declare as an independent and caucus with the Democrats. As I noted in yesterday’s post, his political career was largely defined by this decision which threw control of the Senate to the Democratic Party for the next […]

This Sunday’s Shorts: Somewhat surprisingly, I’ve received more email and twitter responses regarding my posts about allegations that Fareed Zakaria is guilty of plagiarism than I have about any of my Michael Brown-related posts. The OurBadMedia website that published the original accusations against Zakaria has now posted a second set allegedly “showing how Zakaria blatantly […]